George Brecht to Game Boy: A history of play and playfulness

In his study of how a new and messy set of codes about playfulness took shape in the postwar US, Peter D. McDonald illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production. From Fluxus to the Easy-Bake Oven to Tetris to SimCity, The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play charts the transformation of our understanding of what it means to play. Here, McDonald is joined in conversation with Tiffany Funk and Chaz Evans.

Peter D. McDonald is associate professor of design, informal, and creative education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play.

Tiffany Funk is an artist, critical theorist, and researcher who teaches in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Funk is editor-in-chief of Video Game Art Reader and author of HPSCHD: Inside John Cage and Lejaren A. Hiller Jr.’s Radical Multimedia Collaboration.

Chaz Evans is assistant professor of media arts in the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina and author of a forthcoming book in MIT Press’s Platform Studies series.

REFERENCES:

Hannah Higgins / Fluxus Experience 

Barbara Stafford

Rube Goldberg

George Brecht

Yoko Ono

Seth Giddings / Toy Theory

Fredric Jameson

Benjamin Patterson / A Game: Three Capacities and One Inhibition

Shigeko Kubota / Video Chess

Brian Sutton-Smith

Marjory Allen and the playground movement

Mouse Trap

SimCity

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"Offers a new model for thinking about imaginative intellectual engagement with the material world."
—Amy F. Ogata

"Essential reading for scholars of play and games alike—and perhaps even the seed of a new and exciting field of play studies."
—Aaron Trammell

The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play by Peter D. McDonald is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.